Using CSI to Meet Customer Needs

I recently posted a blog about returning to a service desk I had managed and spoke about how the changing business environment had impacted management’s ability to sustain the current list of Critical Success Factors (CSFs) and Key Performance indicators (KPIs). The 1st question was “What should we measure?” Within the new business reality, we reviewed how the corporate vision, mission, goals and objectives had changed. We spoke with service owners, business process owners, business analysts and customers and asked what was critical to them. We could then determine the services that were creating the most value and enabling them to meet these new goals and objectives.

Management then identified the gaps of “what we should measure”, to “what we can measure”. From this, a more customer-centric list was developed. The overriding objective of these new service measurements was to provide a meaningful view of the IT service as experienced by our customers. The three key areas that customers most cared about were:

Is the service available?
Is it reliable?
Is it being delivered with the proper level of performance?

The Service desk together with Technical Management began to tie incidents to specific CIs to measure component availability. Management reviewed the “Expanded Incident Lifecycle” and reliability of services and components. They measured the maintainability of components and CIs tied to particular service incidents. They measured the serviceability of their suppliers to meet contracted services. From a performance perspective, they worked with capacity management and tied performance related incidents of services to components and CIs. All of these positively impacted the availability and reliability of those critical business services on which the customer depended.

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